January 6, 2011
A Poem: Tea words as appropriated from Oxford Canadian Dictionary
tea. tea bag. tea ball. teaberry. tea biscuit. tea bread. tea break. tea caddy. teacake. tea ceremony. tea chest. tea cozy. teacup. tea dance. tea garden. tea house. tea lady. tea leaf. tea party. tea plant. teapot. teapoy. tea room. tea rose. tea service. tea shop. teaspoon. tea strainer. tea table. tea time. tea towel. tea tray. tea tree. tea trolley.
January 5, 2011
Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
Confession: I’m not especially crazy about Jackson Brodie, the sometime-PI of Kate Atkinson‘s exceptional crime novels. I mean, I’ve got nothing against the guy either, but that I’ll automatically read any book he appears in has far less to do with the man than his creator. Kate Atkinson is one of the best contemporary novelists in the English language, I only turned to crime (fiction) when she started writing it, and her crime fiction is as good as anything she ever wrote, including my favourite of her novels, the award-winning Behind the Scene at the Museum. The latest in her Jackson Brodie series, Started Early, Took My Dog, definitely doesn’t disappoint.
The novels in the Brodie series definitely stand alone, though first-time readers will find themselves wading through some treacherous back story. Jackson Brodie is the link between the books, not so much as the solver of the crimes in question, but as a magnet for incident, and co-incident. Stories have always happened around him, beginning with the murder of sister in childhood, which becomes his most formative experience.
In Started Early, Took My Dog, Jackson is living even further than usual on the fringes of the law, still recovering from the fraudster wife who stole his money, still pining for Louise Monroe up in Scotland, still connected to Julia who knows him better than anyone, and striving to be a good father to his children in spite of everything else that has happened.
But of course, his story remains on this novel’s periphery. At its centre is Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police officer who, in a moment of weakness, ends up with a child that isn’t her own, and then suddenly finds herself pursued by a variety of unsavoury characters. One of these characters is Jackson Brodie, who’s trying to track down the origins of Hope McMaster, a woman who’d been adopted thirty-five years before whose story is vaguely connected to Tracy’s through a social worker’s file. As in all of Atkinson’s novels, the past and the present are impossibly intertwined. Who was Hope McMaster? Who is the child in Tracy’s care? What are the Leeds police force still trying to hide after all these years? And who is the strange man who appears to be on Jackson’s trail?
I find reading Kate Atkinson to be a most intoxicating experience– her immersion in her characters’ thoughts, and how she does twists and turns like nobody’s business, and just when I think I’ve got it figured out, she twists it around again. She works coincidence in this way that makes me marvel at the world– not relying on it as a plot device as bad writers do, but instead coincidence is her entire preoccupation, her books are an examination of it. Her books are funny, smart, never saccharine. And they are dark, unflinching in their assertion that the world is a dangerous place to be a woman, the stories violent, gruesome at times, highlighting injustice, but then Atkinson’s narratives culminate in their own kind of justice– goodness triumphs.
So Jackson Brodie lives to fight yet another day, but even more importantly, Kate Atkinson lives to write another book, and how fortunate are we for that.
January 5, 2011
You have to be a speedy reader
I’ve long followed the dictum of Dr. Seuss who wrote in his great work I Can Read With My Eyes Shut, “You have to be a speedy reader because there’s so so much to read.” I’ve also come under the influence of Art Garfunkel (naturally), who keeps an online list of books he’s read since 1968. (I wish I had kept such a list online. My own “Books Read Since 2006” disappeared with my hard drive in June 2009). And however much I enjoyed Steven Beattie’s post calling for slow, considered reading, for an end to the competitive reading fad (and, for those of you who get out more than I do, such a thing actually exists), I must now mount my own defence of the speedy read, because it’s the only way for me.
It comes naturally to me, reading books quickly. For a while, I tried to slow down, but it made me miserable. When I read, I find that I’m not racing to the next book as much as I’m barrelling through the book I’m in, and I love the momentum. I love taking in a book all at once, or as much as possible, in one sitting. Devouring, live and whole. The way blood pumps through my veins is how I like to read my books, pulsing, surging, singing, vital.
I love how reading one book after another illuminates the most curious connections. I love how reading quickly permits such breadth, and bizarre reading tangests for the fun of it: Barbara Pym, all the Mitfords, my Judith Viorst-a-thon etc., and still keep up on what’s current. I love how a book in a day means that the book was my day, inextricably tied, and therefore my books read list functions as a kind of diary.
And yes, I love my books read list (now Since May 2009), which doesn’t necessarily have to be numbered, I realize, but the numbers are something tangible I’ve built out of book after book. A commitment to reading lots isn’t always a commitment to reading too quickly– it means reading instead of any number of things, such as television, bedtime, or walking down the street bookless. It’s making reading a main priority, which is something to be celebrated. This kind of commitment can be a joyful one too, and not a chore. I am really happier reading (a good book) than when I’m doing most anything else in the world. It’s not a competitive sport with other people as much as with myself: I want to read all the worthwhile books that exist in the world, or at least as many as I can possibly manage.
Being a fast reader doesn’t mean I’m a bad reader, particularly because I’m conscious of the drawbacks to my furious reading pace. Which is the reason I started my books read list, for tracking purposes. Which is the reason I started blogging about books in the first place: to provide me with a space for reflection, a way to engage deeper with the books I come across. Which is the reason I make a point of rereading books as often as I do (and that’s the great thing about speedy reading: it gives us the time to do so).
It is possible for quality and quantity to be most excellent bedfellows. I will indeed be heeding Steven’s challenge for us “to read better: to be more sensitive, expansive readers, to enter more deeply into the text, to actively engage with books on an intellectual, aesthetic, and linguistic level”, but there’s just no way I’m slowing down, because I’m only getting started.
January 4, 2011
New website for Literature for Life!
I’m very excited about Literature for Life’s new website, which Stuart and I have been working on together for the past month. And now it’s done. It’s a gorgeous site for an excellent organization, which runs reading circles for pregnant and parenting teenagers in Toronto– go here to find ways in which you can offer your support.
I’m also looking forward to co-administering the Literature for Life blog from here on in. Hope you’ll stop in from time to time.
January 4, 2011
The eye of the storm
A while ago, I answered some questions for The New Quarterly‘s blog “The Literary Type” about new motherhood and my essay “Love is a Let-Down”.
An excerpt:
“The point is that the storm is. Yes, it passes, and thank goodness it does, but that passing means nothing when you’re living it. But I think acknowledging the storm itself does mean something, that you’re not merely failing to feel the right things, that other mothers have been there before. It would help to acknowledge these experiences as part of a natural process of adjustment. And this does not merely free a new mother from her isolation, but it also provides tangible evidence that the storm does pass, that such a promise is not simply platitudes, because so many of us have been through it, and here we are on the other side.”
Read the whole thing here. And thanks to TNQ’s Rosalynn, who is expecting her own baby any day now! Best of luck and congratulations. xo
January 4, 2011
Miscommunicado
Recently, I was speaking to someone who felt it necessary to commend me for having interests beyond my child, which sort of galled me, because I wondered what business was it of his where any of my interests lie. It continues to be very important for me to engage with the world in various ways, but what if it wasn’t? It is easy to make being a parent an all-consuming business, but I can think of worse things to be consumed by.
And then I was recounting this to a friend of mine who gave me her definition of an all-consumed parent, which is that friend who has a baby and never calls you again. Another, I suppose, would be the parent who is unable to talk about anything except their children (which would be fair enough if they ever asked questions about your own life, but they never do). The problem with these people, I would think, is not that these parents are all-consumed, but that they’re crappy friends, and totally rude. (Or maybe, maybe, they’re totally overwhelmed by new parenthood and require your support? Though this excuse should definitely come with an end-date).
Anyway, from all this discussion, it occurred to me how rarely any of us are ever talking about the same thing. How careful we should be in giving opinions, in taking things personally, and how important it is to be articulate. That perhaps so much of what divides us (and I am thinking of women in particular, for there is no group more division-prone, except perhaps the Protestant church) is quite illusory, and how easily we might be able to clear things up with a bit of conversation.
January 3, 2011
Canada Reads Independently Spotlight: Be Good by Stacey May Fowles
Stacey May Fowles, with her first novel Be Good, has a kind of become shorthand with Canadian critics for a new direction in Canadian Literature. No longer are we all languishing on the prairies, dying in childbirth as lightning strikes the barn and fries our last remaining cow, Fowles’ characters are unabashedly contemporary, her stories set in urban places, and usually have adjectives applied to them like “gritty”, “edgy” and “real”.
Though Robert J. Wiersema finds her work has precedent in his Canada Reads Independently pitch:
Fowles’ prose is reminiscent of [Raymond] Carver’s, almost clinical in its precision, not cold but incisive. Its starkness, and her frequently brutal insights, underscore a novel that is relentless in its pursuit of hard emotional truths. What does it mean to “be good”? What does it mean to be a friend? Where does one find meaning in a world seemingly devoid of significance? And what of love? In a way, Be Good revolves around love, about its levels, its possibility, its risk, and its impossibility.
Wiersema explains that the novel, which focuses on “a loose constellation of twenty-somethings… doesn’t so much unfold as it does explode in a narrative-impressionist flurry, jumping from Montreal to Vancouver, from character to character, across time and meaning. The initial sense of flurry, however, only momentarily obscures a tightly organized, thematic- and character-driven work which builds through pain and doubt and fragile joy and sexual violence to moments of catharsis and heartbreak.”
A review in Prairie Fire called Be Good “vividly authentic”, and Quill & Quire reported that “the novel offers a thoughtful examination of sexuality, relationships, and what it means to tell the truth.” At the TINARS site, Fowles has compiled a Be Good playlist (along with an interview). Fowles has already had some Canada Readsish experience, as Zoe Whittall defended her second novel Fear of Fighting for Canada Also Reads last year (which led to me reading the book a few months later). Read more about Be Good at Fowles’ 12 or 20 questions interview (including, “In Be Good I really wanted to focus on place as a character so really investigating geography was imperative to that. After all the lonely city living I’ve experience I’ve become mildly obsessed with what the urban landscape can do to a person.”)
Be Good has a Joan Didion epigraph, which means either I’m going to love it or really hate it. I’ve already become quite fond of the novel’s design, however, and if its contents end up being anywhere as well-executed, it’s probably going to be the former.
January 2, 2011
East Side Public Library
Photograph: Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre
From the “Detroit in Ruins” gallery at The Guardian. Accompanying story is here. It amazes me that the books were just left behind, like jetsam, as though no possible further use could be imagined for them.
January 1, 2011
Messy mountain
I lack a really great camera, good lighting, and a knack for perfection, so my photos never look quite like the food blogs, but will you believe me anyway when I promise you that this messy mountain of blueberry pancakes was the very best way to bring in 2011? The recipe comes from here, and we can’t get enough– it’s the second time we’ve had them this week. We’ve also been enjoying fresh pasta from our pasta-maker, chickadees at our bird feeder, homemade bread with butternut squash and kale soup, and the undemands of a rainy day. By which I mean that if my new-years’ resolution had been to never leave the house, we’d be off to a fantastic start, but then I did just start reading Kate Atkinson, so you probably understand. Anyway, I’m still recovering from a wild night of watching episodes of 30 Rock and bringing in the new year to Elizabeth Mitchell’s version of Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day”.
December 31, 2010
Happy New Year
In every way, it’s been a pretty wonderful year. We began it still pretty shell shocked from the chaos that having a baby created, but it was also when I really began to enjoy the shape of our new life with Harriet, and the pace of our every day lives together started improving in leaps and bounds. Harriet has become more fabulous with every passing month, and these days we never threaten to throw her out the window more than once or twice a week. I also continue to adore her dad a whole lot, and note that he is pretty much the key to everything good.
Other keys to everything have been joining a local writers’ salon with a wonderful group of women who are extraordinary in both talent and generosity of spirit. Our meetings have been a source of great company, conversation, ideas, inspiration, and friends. Concurrently, I have also been honoured to be a member of The Vicious Circle book club, and meetings have been along similar lines (albeit a bit more ribald in tone). Both have been the very best ways to spend my time-off from motherhood, and I look forward to them always. I also mark how far I’ve become this past year by remembering my first salon meeting in February, how I’d never left Harriet in the evening before, but how we all made it (including Stuart, who was tasked with putting her to bed solo), and how me leaving the house at night is no longer remotely a big deal.
I have been extraordinarily blessed by creative opportunities this year. I’ve had two stories published, and had a dream come true as reading as part of Eden Mills Festival Fringe Stage. I’ve written lots of book reviews, and published two essays on topics I care about deeply (and then there was the matter of that shout-out by the Utne Reader). None of this was on the cards one year ago, and so it leaves me hopeful for what 2011 will bring (though I looking forward to seeing my piece in the Sharon Butala Special Issue of Prairie Fire this Fall, which has been forthcoming for about two years now).
My goals this year are to finish the first draft of my novel, to finally read Great Expectations, and to not drive our rental car into anything when we go to England in March. I am going to try to get out to more literary events, although not too hard because there is really no better place to be than my house. I am excited to be teaching The Art and Business of Blogging at the UofT School of Continuing Studies in April. And I look forward to finding new and creative ways to live frugally in the city, while concurrently exploiting the many opportunities that city-living brings.
I have read 149 books this year, which I’m pretty pleased with, mostly because so many of them have been wonderful. For this large total, however, I really only do have Harriet to thank, and her wonderfully epic nap times. Long may they live. It has been a diverse list of books read, male and female authors, a bit too heavy on the contemporary due to judging a book prize this summer, but otherwise I can’t see any major gaps. It’s worth nothing, however, just how much satisfaction I am getting from independent Canadian Presses even as I’ve become a more more demanding reader these last few years, and it was so exciting to see them get their due through the Giller long and shortlists this year. May indie presses outlive even Harriet’s naps (or they could both live on forever?).
And may 2011 be full of good things.
